September 08, 2005

Cancer: My Part-time Job

You may have noticed that I haven't been posting much about the Big C lately.

It's not because it's gone away. It hasn't. Life with it has just taken on the characteristics of a part-time job that you don't like all that much, but have to do because you need the money. These days having cancer is a lot like working at McDonald's. Sure, you don't get the funny hat, but the dull monotony and forced cheerfulness is the same.

Every day I take some time to learn something more about My Disease and I've slowly come to the conclusion that, though there's still much to learn, most of it is contradictory. So, does soy protein really stop the spread of Prostate Cancer? Well, maybe. It has is some mice, but we really don't know how this applies to humans. What's the chance of recurrence of the disease after surgery? Stats are all over the map. What started out being gray has slowly turned positively murky.

What I learn daily is how confused everyone is about what is happening in my body. Of course, this includes me. The more I learn, the less I know. It's a wonder that my urologist can talk about Prostate Cancer at all - he's a Professor at the Harvard Medical School.

So, in order for me to post more about the disease it looks like something dramatic is going to have to happen in my body (Cancer decides to take over and stages a coup; Cancer decamps to warmer climes, etc.), so I can have some sort of heroic struggle to write about. In the meantime, it's trench warfare and, as any student of World War I will tell you, this can be awful and terribly boring all at the same time.

So, in the meantime, I'll keep you up to date with PSA numbers and other aspects of CancerWorld that appear to me but, in the meantime, you want fries with that?